Amid chaos at the border, Biden moves to reinstate a migrant policy he denounced.

WSJ
The Editorial Board
Oct. 17, 2021 4:50 pm ET

The Biden Administration has botched immigration policy as badly as it did the Afghanistan withdrawal, and it now may suffer the indignity of re-adopting a Trump-era border policy that candidate Joe Biden denounced as un-American.

“ Donald Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy is dangerous, inhumane, and goes against everything we stand for as a nation of immigrants. My administration will end it,” Mr. Biden tweeted in March 2020. That was when Mr. Biden was courting the left.

Now chaos prevails at the border as hundreds of thousands try to enter illegally, and the Department of Homeland Security has made “great progress” in reviving Remain in Mexico, acting assistant secretary for immigration policy Blas Nuñez-Neto said Thursday. That policy required some categories of asylum seekers to wait south of the border while their claims to enter the U.S. are heard.

Mr. Biden suspended enrollments in the program his first day of office and terminated it in June. The states of Texas and Missouri sued in April. A federal court ordered the reinstatement of the program, and the Supreme Court in August declined to issue a stay.

The Administration’s reversal is a tacit admission that Mr. Biden’s immigration policy has failed.

Migrants interpreted the end of Remain in Mexico, among other Biden policies, as an invitation to cross the border, enter the U.S. and claim asylum. Many are then released into the U.S. while they await asylum hearings, and many never show up. In the first 11 months of fiscal 2021, through August, border agents recorded more than 1.5 million encounters with migrants.

As Texas and Missouri argued in court, Remain in Mexico “changed the incentives for economic migrants with weak asylum claims, and therefore reduced the flow of aliens” to the border. Economic migrants are less likely to try to game the asylum system if they can’t set foot in the U.S.

Mexico must agree to resume the policy, but talks are proceeding, the Biden Administration said in court filings last week. Critics note the dangerous conditions on the southern side of the border. They’ve got a point, but the current border chaos has undermined public support for generous immigration policies. Imperfect as it is, Remain in Mexico reduces the burden on the immigration courts and hastens decisions for legitimate asylum-seekers.

The central blunder of the Biden Presidency has been surrendering to the left on issue after issue. Most of today’s progressive policies are detached from how the world works, and that includes the reality of migration.

If Mr. Biden wants to end the humanitarian crisis at the border, the White House will have to show it can enforce U.S. immigration law while working to create more legal pathways for economic migrants and reforming the broken U.S. asylum system.